Death at work

“Encouraging a person to commit suicide is punishable by three years’ imprisonment and a fine of € 45,000 where the encouragement is followed by a suicide or attempted suicide” (French penal code, article 223-13).

France leads the list of countries where the suicide rate has grown since 1975. The rate among working males reached 11,000 a year by 2000 – “more than one every hour” as the sociologists Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet pointed out. “Suicide is invariably the result of major contradictions between the demands of social life and the nature of the individual”. Recent statistics from France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) indicate that the rate is now stabilising at around 12,000 a year.

There are no figures to indicate whether any of this is work-related. Suicide at work, like any act of self-harm, is an enigma. It is not new: in 1995 the CGT trade union noted eight suicides among subcontracted maintenance workers at the Electricité de France (EDF) nuclear power station at Chinon, near Tours. The media were not interested.

Deaths that mattered

Maintenance work at Chinon involved radioactive materials. The managers of French nuclear facilities have to observe legal limits for individual exposure to radiation. Rather than reduce exposure, they prefer to rotate large numbers of subcontracted and temporary workers. This practice is known as job management by dose (gestion de l’emploi par la dose): when individual workers have absorbed an acceptable amount of radiation, they lose their jobs.

While the nuclear industry maintained its public image, claiming to respect “threshold limit value ceilings”, contract workers had a choice between staying in work and keeping healthy. The 25,000-35,000 outside workers brought into radiation risk areas to do maintenance (50% of those studied) suffered 80% of total collective exposure to radiation within the industry. The media were still not interested.

Annie Thébaud-Mony is a sociologist and director of research at France’s National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm). She is the author of Travailler peut nuire gravement à votre santé (Working can damage your health) (La Découverte, Paris, 2007)